


Fulcrum

by sarahcakes613



Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: I have a Jewish mother so yes yes iamright, Jewish Bucky Barnes, Jewish mothers amiright, Love Confessions, M/M, Modern Bucky Barnes, Tony Stark is NOT a sugar daddy, the mildest of daddy kink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-10
Updated: 2020-05-10
Packaged: 2021-03-03 04:53:39
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,204
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24109285
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sarahcakes613/pseuds/sarahcakes613
Summary: He says it like a question, because it kind of is, because the question is what the fuck even is his life right now that he’s on the phone telling his mother that Tony can’t make it to yet another Shabbat dinner because evil scientists are a thing that really exist.Or, Bucky's mother doesn't care that her son's dating a superhero.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Tony Stark
Comments: 27
Kudos: 240





	Fulcrum

**Author's Note:**

> A funny tweet sparked the idea and CxB and Alex fanned the flames. 
> 
> Brought to you by the google searches "how long does brisket take", "what degrees does tony stark have", and "names of coastal regions of maine".

“ _Nu_ , what is it this time?”

“Hi, ma.”

“Don’t ‘hi, ma’ me, out with it, what’s his excuse this time?”

Bucky squints up into the sky, as if the sun piercing through the clouds is going to cast a beam of light in front of him highlighting the answer that will get his mother off his case.

Instead, all he sees is his boyfriend and a half-dozen of the Iron Legion droids flying off in the direction of Maine.

“Some kind of octopus with lasers is attacking fishermen in Passamaquoddy Bay?”

He says it like a question, because it kind of is, because the question is what the fuck even is his life right now that he’s on the phone telling his mother that Tony can’t make it to yet another Shabbat dinner because evil scientists are a thing that really exist.

He hears a _tsk_ in his ear, his mother sucking her teeth at his explanation.

“You know, your sister’s dentist has a gay brother-in-law.”

Bucky blinks.

“Dr. Freeman?”

“What? No, Dr. Freeman retired last year. Dr. Azoulai, he’s a nice boy, his wife volunteers at the library. Anyhow, her brother just got accepted into Cardozo and he’s moving out to Manhattan this summer, but he doesn’t know anyone in the city, so I gave him your number.”

“ _Ma!_ You can’t just give my number out to strangers!”

“He’s not a stranger! I told you, he’s your sister’s dentist’s-“

“Brother-in-law, yeah, I heard you.“

Bucky toes at the gravel at his feet. He’s standing on the helipad atop Stark Tower and his lips still tingle from where Tony had kissed him goodbye. They’ve been dating seriously for about eight months, longer than any of Bucky’s college-era relationships had lasted by some weeks.

Bucky knew his mother didn’t understand their dynamic. Tony was a billionaire super hero engineer, Bucky was a barista putting himself through library school on tips and student loans. It shouldn’t have worked on paper, unless that paper was a queer sugar daddy romance novel, but the reality was it did work, and Bucky was happy.

And in love, but Tony doesn’t know that yet. Bucky’s still waiting for the right moment to say it. Which might wind up being from behind bars, if his mother doesn’t stop giving his number out to every gay Jewish man in a 20-mile radius around Red Hook.

He tunes back into the voice in his ear, which as moved on from matchmaking and is now filling him in on gossip about people he sees once a year at holiday services.

“-and of course, Vanessa, you remember Vanessa, she was in your b’nei mitzvah class, she’s just moved home because her husband, that _gonif_ , he got all tangled up in that mess in Hell’s Kitchen so now her apartment’s a _crime scene_ , and I said to your father, that’s what you get for letting your daughter go to art school, who knows what kind of people you’re going to meet there!”

Bucky cuts her off before she can inhale deep enough to start talking again.

“That’s great ma, I gotta go, but give dad a kiss and I’m really sorry about dinner, okay? Why don’t you come up midtown this week and we’ll all go out for lunch? I love you, byeee!”

He hangs up as she’s spluttering, and he knows he’ll have an emoji-filled text from his sister any minute now but he can only take so much of his mother in one go and now he really wants a fuckin’ cigarette, even as he’s trying to quit.

He lets himself have a cigarette, and then a second one, stubbing them out in the coffee tin that everyone pretends he doesn’t keep on the helipad.

He’s been standing there watching the sun go down for the better part of an hour when his phone rings and he swipes it on without looking, because it’s Tony’s special ringtone.

“Hey sweetheart, how do you feel about never eating Takoyaki again?”

The call is patched in through Tony’s suit, so he can see Tony’s face even if he’s still in Iron Man mode. His eyes are focused on whatever’s happening outside the suit but the telltale crinkles are there to show Bucky that he’s feeling relaxed enough to smile, so the fighting’s probably done.

“Aw babe, see, I knew I’d get you ‘round to keeping kosher with me sooner or later!” Bucky jokes as he finally heads back inside. “How bad was it?”

“Nothing a good decontamination shower won’t fix, but I don’t think I can even face sushi for at least a month. We’re wrapping up now, I should be home inside of an hour. Is it bad that I’d honestly give anything for an old-fashioned mad scientist who skips the animal stage and goes straight to experimenting on himself at this point?”

“You do seem to fight a lot of lab experiments gone wrong.” Bucky muses.

A shower sounds pretty good, so he heads to the ensuite, dropping layers as he walks.

Tony’s eyes brighten as he hears the water over the connection.

“Mr. Barnes,” he purrs, “is that my shower I hear in the background?”

“Indeed it is, Mr. Stark, and if you hurry back, you might get here in time to scrub my back.”

“Flying as we speak, sweetheart.”

Bucky switches his phone to speaker so they can keep talking while he’s in the shower.

“My ma’s giving my number out again,” he calls out as he pulls off his socks and tests the water.

“Let me guess, an orthopedist who would never dare skip out on dinner just because an octopus is attacking fishermen?”

“Law student, actually.”

“She’s downgrading her degree requirements, and yet somehow the double master’s before I was even legal still doesn’t impress her. Honestly, I feel like I should be hurt. Somewhere, deep down behind my arc reactor, I am hurt.”

Bucky laughs as he gets into the shower.

“I don’t think it’s your academic background she’s got a problem with so much as it’s the part where you earned ‘em before I was even born.”

“She’s right, I’m a dirty old man and a terrible influence, and she _does_ know you won’t even let me pay your tuition, right?”

“Oh yeah, but she doesn’t think I should refuse. Thinks I should let you pay, since you can afford it and all.”

“So she thinks I should be your sugar but not your daddy, is that what you’re saying?”

“Mm, somethin’ like that.” Bucky’s neck and shoulder muscles start to unknot the longer he stands under the water and he finally feels his body loosening up, relaxing all of the bits of him that clench and lock when he’s on the phone with his mother for more than ten minutes.

He hears a dim whirring coming from outside the shower and there’s a slight echo as he hears it again through his phone. It stops, the phone call disconnecting as Tony’s armour shuts down, and then the man himself is sauntering into the bathroom, already stripped out of his flight suit, a towel wrapped around his waist and his chest bare.

Bucky reaches an arm out to draw him in and Tony follows obediently, towel dropping at his feet. He stands still, out of the range of the showerhead, while Bucky runs his hands over him, checking him for bruises and sore spots. Every mark of discolouration receives a kiss.

When he is finished looking Tony over, he turns around so Tony can wash his back as promised. Tony picks up a loofah and while he soaps Bucky up, he also picks up the thread of their conversation.

“Do you think it would gain or lose me points if she knew who really calls who ‘daddy’ around here?” He muses.

Bucky huffs a laugh, turning around to let the water sluice down his back and rinse the soap off.

“I think I never want to find out what my mother’s opinion is of my boyfriend calling me ‘daddy’, is what I think.”

“Yeah,” Tony says, “might make things uncomfortable.”

“Mm, just a bit.” Bucky agrees, reaching behind to shut the water off.

Bucky knows everybody who sees them from the outside has a picture in their mind, entirely inaccurate and based solely on his youth and Tony’s wealth. He sometimes wishes he could correct them all, could post a photo of Tony’s bright red ass, his hand splayed across it possessively, and caption it with something witty, something that tells everyone in a single sentence who the daddy really is, but he respects the persona that Tony Stark™ has to portray to the public.

And to add to that, there really is no getting around how fucking awkward it would be to have to explain to Winifred Barnes the ins and outs of gay sexual dynamics.

He’s pulled out of his contemplations by the ringing of his phone, and he winces at the sound of the ringtone he’s assigned to the woman herself. Tony passes it over to him, along with a robe, and he taps it to speaker so he can talk and dry his hair at the same time.

“Ma? What’s up, is everything okay?” He doesn’t know why she’d be calling so soon after their last conversation. He tries to catch Tony’s eye for a commiserative eye roll or wink, but the other man is not paying attention to him as he towels himself off.

“Oh everything is fine dear, just fine.” She sounds distracted, but not worried or frantic. “I’m just calling to see if you maybe know something about the refrigerated van’s worth of flowers that were just dropped off on my front step?”

He doesn’t, but he can guess who does, and he’s pretty sure he knows why. He looks over at Tony, who is now blushing and fidgeting with the collar of his robe like he does anytime he’s caught being nice just for the sake of it.

“Yeah, the flowers are from Tony, ma.”

“ _Nu_ , and why is Mr. Big Shot Tony sending me an entire garden of bouquets?”

Bucky puts a hand on Tony’s shoulder, forcing him to meet Bucky’s eyes. “For today?” He mouths, and Tony nods.

“It’s an apology, for having to miss dinner.”

There’s silence on the other end, and then she replies. “And for that he needed a whole florist’s shop?”

“Well, he’s real sorry about it.”

“I suppose maybe an edible arrangement would be too much to ask for next time?” She says, and Bucky laughs, because he knows that this is his mother’s way of accepting the gift, of acknowledging the nice thing that her son’s boyfriend has done.

He ends the call and turns to Tony, who has found something fascinating to look at in the sleeve of his robe. This is the version of Tony he loves best, the soft uncertain Tony that no one else gets to see.

“You didn’t have to do that.” He says, tilting Tony’s chin up to look at him.

Tony shrugs, eyes sliding away. “It was literally the least I could do. This is the fourth time we’ve had plans cancelled by villainy. Maybe I should stop making my social calendar public.” He says it lightly, but Bucky can see the tightness around his eyes.

“We keep missing dinner because bad guys are checking your schedule on the cloud? Mind you, these days, it’s as valid a possibility as any. We should tell my mother; she’ll have the whole lot of them cleaned up in no time. Do they have no respect for how long it takes to make a good brisket?”

Tony laughs and Bucky leans down to kiss him. All these weeks, he’s been waiting for the right time to tell Tony how he feels, waiting for a grand moment when here it is at last, a small moment, just them, wrapped up in bathrobes, but it’s so clearly the right moment JARVIS may as well be flashing it on the wall.

“Really, Tony. It was a good thing, and it means a lot to me. _You_ mean a lot to me. I –“ Bucky takes a deep breath. “I love you.”

Tony goes still under his hands, his breath speeding up, and Bucky moves to step back, to give him space. “It’s okay if you don’t say it back right now, I just needed you to know. I won’t say it again if you’d prefer.”

Tony reaches to stop him from going too far, clutching at his arms. “No, no take-backsies. You said it, now you have to keep saying it.”

Bucky grins. “Yeah, okay, I can do that.”

Tony presses a desperate kiss on Bucky’s lips. “And of course I’m saying it back, I’ve been biting my tongue on saying it for months now. I love you so much, Bucky.”

He really did mean it when he’d said it was okay if Tony didn’t say it back, but he won’t deny the heat the runs down his spine at hearing it. It feels good, feels right, to be saying it here in a steamy bathroom, sharing kisses with the man he loves.

**Author's Note:**

> wow this story fought me tooth and nail it wanted to be like 4 different things and I kind of hate the ending but it's DONE.

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic of] Fulcrum](https://archiveofourown.org/works/25105459) by [Flowerparrish](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Flowerparrish/pseuds/Flowerparrish)




End file.
